November 2010 - Issue #11
Game on: pixel power adds muscle to galactic science
Story by Clarisa Collis
View articles in related topics: Astrophysics
Australia’s lead in global astronomy will be boosted through a multi-million-dollar upgrade to Swinburne’s supercomputer research facility, gSTAR.
The power balance shifts quickly among supercomputers. Continually jostling for position since their emergence in 1949, supercomputers are inherently the products of competitive succession.
The meteoric rise of the Chinese supercomputer, Nebulae, to second position on the world’s list of top supercomputers in June, marked a turning point in the race because it is powered by graphic processing units (GPUs) that have evolved from computer gaming.
It is the first time a supercomputer running GPUs has ranked near the top of supercomputer development. GPUs add a vastly higher level of visual or graphical detail to simulations.
Now, Swinburne University of Technology is entering this global competition as a serious contender with the installation of GPUs in its supercomputer at the Hawthorn campus.
Senior lecturer and astronomer from Swinburne’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing Dr Christopher Fluke says the upgraded facility is expected to rank among the world’s top 500 supercomputers following its completion in 2011.
The beefed-up Swinburne computer will have particular relevance to the university’s international astronomy program.
Dr Fluke says Swinburne researchers are creating a blueprint for using the specialised techniques required to program GPUs by pioneering their use for astronomy.
“We are one of the only groups in the world that will be able to create 3-D images of the largest astronomy datasets,” he says.
Swinburne’s step up in supercomputing is drawn from the highly competitive parallel world of the computer gaming industry, which has been using GPUs to draw colours on computer screens, at increasing speeds, for about 15 years.
In contrast to central processing units (CPUs) that process information in sequence with an emphasis on control logic and fast memory, GPUs (single-chip processors) can perform a number of high-speed tasks simultaneously.
“It’s been three decades since Space Invaders was first released and it’s obvious that the quality and level of detail in computer game graphics has advanced incredibly during this time,” Dr Fluke points out. “A GPU costing a few hundred dollars can draw 10 billion pixels to the screen per second.”
The multi-million-dollar upgrade to Swinburne’s supercomputer research facility – gSTAR – to allow 600 trillion computations per second is intended to accelerate the rate of science and knowledge discovery.
Swinburne astrophysicist Dr Darren Croton says GPU technology will extend the frontiers of astronomy. “This huge advance in power gives us the opportunity to tackle problems that are potentially 100 times harder,” he says. “It’s like supercharging your car: instead of a top speed of 100 kilometres per hour, your new top speed is 10,000 kilometres per hour.
“This means an astrophysics simulation that would previously have taken three months to complete might only take a single day. We will be able to create simulations of colliding galaxies and black holes, and model the evolution of the entire universe at unprecedented levels of detail,” Dr Croton says.
This will be critical to the work of Swinburne PhD student Ben Barsdell, who is leading the astronomy community into unchartered territory with his work exploring the remnants of pulsars (exploded stars) and gravitational ‘lensing’ to predict how massive objects in the universe distort light.
These investigations ultimately aim to guide astronomers’ decisions about choice of programming language and whether GPUs are appropriate to certain codes (software).
Dr Fluke says the upgrade, which involves a $2 million contribution from Swinburne and $1 million from the Australian Government’s Education Investment Fund (EIF), will allow nationwide access via remote login.
With gSTAR available to astronomers from other universities and research centres, the EIF is also funding a support position at Swinburne to provide expertise and guidance with the new technology, particularly for optimising codes.
“Scientific problems that I would not have considered tackling in the past will be feasible following the upgrade,” Dr Fluke says.
“My code is ready to go on day one … they can’t build it soon enough for me.”
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